Okay, who slipped truth serum into Evan Thomas’s coffee?

On Friday, Newsweek’s “Editor at Large” (according to his bio here) appeared on “Inside Washington” (link to entire show is here; transcript not yet available). After being cued up with a softball from host Gordon Peterson about how supposedly great Friday’s news about the drop in the national unemployment rate was (uh, not exactly, Gordon), Thomas segued into a somewhat surprising comment about how ObamaCare’s implementation is going as it meets the real world. In a word (Thomas’s), it’s a disaster (HT Daily Caller via Instapundit):

GORDON PETERSON: A minute ago we heard a Congressman talking about repealing the, quote, “job-killing affordable health care law act.” “Job-killing” is now attached to everything the Democrats love, apparently. But on Friday we learned that the unemployment rate had dropped to 9.4%. Uh, that’s good news for Democrats, not so perhaps such good news for people who talk about job-killing legislation.

EVAN THOMAS: Because of Congress. I mean, y’know, the unemployment will go down a little bit, but the game in Washington, it will still be this unreal game. On health care though, I gotta say that’s one place where the Republicans are right. Uh, the health care bill is, is a disaster, we’re sort of slowly learning that. It’s not working. It’s interesting, that through implementing it, and it’s not working out at all as people anticipated. There’s also wildly wrong projections. People aren’t — As it’s been practiced, it’s failed.

In discussing the “good news” about the unemployment rate drop, Peterson “somehow” forgot that about half of the reason why it occurred is that over a quarter-million of the unemployed stopped looking for work. An Investors Business Daily editorial noted: “Today, the labor force is actually smaller than it was when the recession began. President Obama’s economic program is driving people out of the work force faster than it’s bringing them in. Some progress.”

Apparently assuming that no one in the panel’s viewing audience could possibly be interested in learning some of the details of the ObamaCare failure Thomas cited, Peterson quickly changed the subject to how new Majority Leader John Boehner is supposedly breaking a fall campaign promise by not allowing debate or amendments on an anticipated up-or-down vote to repeal ObamaCare. This was a real hot button for fellow panelist Mark Shields, who could barely contain himself before weighing in with his faux “gotcha.”

Geez, one of the core promises in the GOP’s Pledge to America is to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety (from Page 6 of the Plan; large PDF):

Of course, Americans remember that President Obama argued his government takeover of health care was the single most important thing we could do to address our growing debt crisis. This notion has since been thoroughly discredited: we now know the new health care law will mean more financial pain for seniors, families, and the federal government. We offer a plan to repeal and replace the government takeover of health care with common sense solutions focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs.

Hello, Gordon and Mark? The Pledge promises full repeal, not a piecemeal mush. Allowing any kind of water-down would be the real promise-breaker.

As to Thomas’s comments on ObamaCare, don’t wait by your computer for follow-up reports from anyone, including Thomas himself, identifying the specific ways in which ObamaCare has failed thus far.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Queensland, Australia:

January 3, 2011 – 11:49AM

Tens of thousands of lives could be saved each year by a groundbreaking Australian scheme to wipe out dengue fever.

Scientists have developed a bacterium that acts as a vaccine for mosquitoes, which could in turn stop the disease spreading in humans.

Professor Scott O’Neill, from the University of Queensland, says he is “incredibly excited” as a 12-week field trial starts in the Cairns suburbs of Yorkeys Knob and Gordonvale.

With up to 100 million people – largely from developing countries – being infected with dengue fever each year, a global solution was long overdue, he said.

Up to 40,000 people die, because families in poorer nations are unable to seek health care.

Prof O’Neill said his project could become the safest and most cost-effective solution, eliminating the need for environmentally harmful insecticides.

“By April we should know if we are on the right track or not, in our bid to stop the Aedes aegypti mosquito from being able to transmit the dengue virus between people,” he told AAP on Monday.

The field trial, beginning on Tuesday, involves introducing strains of a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia into the mosquito population.

Laboratory research has shown that Wolbachia acts like a vaccine for the mosquito, by monopolising resources needed by the dengue virus. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The irresponsible propagandists posing as journalists at the Associated Press are going to a frequently visited well tonight — the one where any violence committed against a Democrat or liberal must somehow and in some way be due to a climate of hostility created solely by conservatives, Republicans, and more recently, Tea Party activists.

Never mind that the person who allegedly shot Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and murdered several others, Jared Loughner, is reportedly a marijuana-using loner who lists the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as among his favorite books, or that the most recent items which could bee seen as potential incitements to violence against Giffords have come from the left, in response to her refusal to back Nancy Pelosi for Minority Leader in the House just days ago.

Specifically:

• Here’s a link (partial screen grab here for when it comes down; corroborated by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge; HT Doug Ross) to Laughner’s YouTube profile.
• Here’s a screen grab of a DailyKos post from Thursday entitled “My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi And is now DEAD to Me!” Charming. Michelle Malkin notes that the post has been pulled. The post’s author has left a comment stating: “i now am FULL of guilt after writing this diary. i am a proud atheist, so pray for yourself, not me. i don’t need prayers, nor want them.”
• It didn’t take me long to find this comment at another “progressive” forum, where proprietor “Booman” travels into the realm of desiring thuggery: “Here’s a list of disloyal jerkoff Democrats who didn’t vote for Pelosi as Minority Leader … I hope Pelosi crushes these idiots and makes their lives miserable. I’m not kidding.”

Despite all of this, here are paragraphs from the Associated Press’s 7:09 p.m. report (since updated; saved here at my host for future reference, fair use and discussion) trying to pin the implied blame on the right:

Giffords has drawn the ire of the right in the last year, especially from politicians like Sarah Palin (Note: Sarah Palin is currently a private citizen — Ed.) over her support of the health care bill. It’s still not clear if the gunman had the health care debate in mind or was focused on his own unique set of political beliefs as witnessed in the Internet videos.

Law enforcement officials said members of Congress reported 42 cases of threats or violence in the first three months of 2010, nearly three times the 15 cases reported during the same period a year earlier. Nearly all dealt with the health care bill, and Giffords was among the targets.

Giffords’ Tucson office was vandalized a few hours after the House voted to approve the health care law in March, with someone either kicking or shooting out a glass door and window. In an interview after the vandalism, Giffords referred to the animosity against her by conservatives. Palin listed Giffords’ seat as one of the top “targets” in the midterm elections because of the lawmakers’ support for the health care law.

… In the hours after the shooting, Palin issued a statement in which she expressed her “sincere condolences” to the family of Giffords and the other victims.

… The shooting comes amid a highly charged political environment that has seen several dangerous threats against lawmakers but nothing that reached the point of actual violence.

A San Francisco man upset with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s support of health care reform pleaded guilty to threatening the Democratic congresswoman and her family, calling her directly on March 25 and threatening to destroy her Northern California home if she voted for health care reform.

In July, a California man known for his anger over left-leaning politics engaged in a shootout with highway patrol officers after planning an attack on the ACLU and another nonprofit group. The man said he wanted to “start a revolution” by killing people at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation.

During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

“I don’t see the connection,” between the fundraisers featuring weapons and Saturday’s shooting, said John Ellinwood, Kelly’s spokesman. “I don’t know this person, we cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign in any way. I just don’t see the connection.”

Neither does anyone else, which is why it’s incredibly irresponsible and cynically political to go there. If the AP couldn’t resist, it was irresponsible of it not to mention the more recent left-related items I have noted above.

To be clear, I’m not blaming those leftists identified earlier for inciting Laughner’s violence. My point is that Associated Press has no more business pinning implied blame on a right-wing atmosphere condoning violence than I would if I tried to claim that “Booman,” the Kos poster and others encouraged Laughner to commit multiple murders.

But the Associated Press has irresponsibly gone where it had no business going, to the eternal shame of the wire service and the reporters involved: Terry Tang, Amanda Lee Myers, David Espo, and contributing reporters Pauline Arrilliga, Jacques Billeaud, Bob Christie, Paul Davenport, Matt Apuzzo, Eileen Sullivan, Adam Goldman and Charles Babington.

We can only hope that subscribing AP news outlets possess enough sense not to use the particularly execrable elements of this supposedly “objective” news story.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

In a Friday evening op-ed:

Defenders of ObamaCare have seized upon a Jan. 6 letter from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to House Speaker John Boehner alleging that repeal would “increase the deficit.” Don’t be bamboozled. When big spenders call for “deficit reduction,” they mean raising your taxes. That is what ObamaCare does.

The CBO letter says that the health law spends $780 billion in the next decade and pays for it by raising taxes and fees by $410 billion, and by reducing future Medicare funding by $500 billion. The CBO argues that the law raises more money ($910 billion) than it spends, but that is hardly sufficient reason to keep it, or any law.

Projections from another federal agency—the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)—fill in the grim picture on what ObamaCare will do. The CMS figures, released Sept. 9, show that if you buy your own health plan, you will have to pay more every year than you would have if the law hadn’t passed.

… To expand Medicaid, the law eviscerates Medicare. It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul, only it’s robbing Grandma and Grandpa. The CMS shows that in 2019 the Obama health law reduces annual Medicare funding so much that it works out to $1,428 less for each elderly patient that year. Richard Foster, chief actuary for Medicare, has spoken with brave bluntness about the possible impact, warning that some hospitals may stop accepting Medicare. Where will seniors go?

Of course, the CBO also makes no attempt to estimate the economic growth-retarding impact of ObamaCare’s tax increases, which would shred its deficit-reduction claims even further.

When the CBO came out with its deficit-reduction assertion early last year, Katie Couric laughably described it as a “certified price tag.” Anyone who would characterize a projection into an uncertain future in such a manner is a candidate to be considered certifiable.

From Mt. Vernon, Maine:

Posted: January 2
Updated: 10:05 PM

News of Ron Herrick’s passing came last week, amid all the headlines that, so often, feature a fleeting somebody doing something forgettable.

Why Herrick’s death was mentioned, though, is because he should never be forgotten.

Herrick decided 56 years ago to donate a kidney to his dying twin brother, leading to the world’s first successful organ transplant. As the first organ donor, he helped blaze a trail in a procedure that has since saved countless lives.

But what also makes Herrick’s passing so newsworthy, and his loss felt so deeply, is the life he lived beyond the transplant. This side of Herrick’s story is well known by the wife he loved for 51 years, the students he helped to understand and the boy with whom he shared his love of farming.

“He was an amazing individual,” said friend Roland Bean of Mount Vernon. “I have to say that I loved that man.”

Ron’s wife, Cynthia, and his sister, Virginia, were at his side when Ron died Dec. 27 at the Augusta Rehabilitation Center at age of 79. Ron’s health had declined since an October heart surgery.

Ron and his twin brother, Richard, were born June 15, 1931 in Worcester, Mass. Ron’s early years were spent on the family farm in Rutland, Mass. The farming bug got under Ron’s skin from an early age.

“There’s nothing he enjoyed more than running his tractor and mowing hay,” said Ron’s nephew, Scott Herrick, who purchased his uncle’s farm in Mount Vernon in 1997.

Ron and Cynthia purchased that farm in 1970, two years after moving to Maine. Ron, who had been a math teacher in Massachusetts, took a position at Winthrop Middle School in 1968. He spent 18 years at Winthrop before spending the next 10 years as an instructor at the University of Maine at Augusta. He retired from teaching in 1996 after a 37-year career.

“He loved math,” Cynthia Herrick said. “He loved to get it across, especially to people who had trouble with it. He had a knack for making it clear.

“He was a teacher and a farmer, those were his loves,” Cynthia continued. “He did a good job with both of them.”

Scott Herrick was just 9 years old when he began farming with his uncle.

“It was always a bit of camaraderie being out in the hayfield,” Scott said. “He never talked down to me. He was never mean to me. He was always just a great guy. I idolized him as a kid, and still.”

Scott remembers his uncle’s dry sense of humor. He could get Scott rolling with a simple gesture, without cracking so much as a smile.

Then there was Ron’s mind, which never seemed overly challenged.

“He knew so much more about farming than I ever will,” Scott said. “He would look at something and come up with a solution. Nine times out of 10 it worked.”

Ron rarely talked about his place in medical history, and never without prodding. Bean and Ron were friends and neighbors for years before he knew Ron had been the first organ donor. Bean had to pry his friend for details.

“It wasn’t something he carried around as a badge,” Bean said. “He was proud to be part of it, but he didn’t make a big deal out of it.”

Ron was always friendly, but he kept his emotions in check, Cynthia said. Ron’s most sentimental moments came when talking about Richard.

“It was always hard, even for me, to figure out what was going on inside his head,” Cynthia said. “I would tend to be the one to get emotional or upset. He never indulged in that sort of thing. He took things in stride. He kept me on the straight and narrow.”

There was nothing about Ron that made him stand out, Bean said, but his quiet presence commanded respect from those who met him. Bean and Herrick served a number of years together on the Mount Vernon Board of Selectmen.

Ron was as straightforward in town service as he was in the classroom or the hayfield.

“The thing that always impressed me about Ron is he could stand in front of somebody and tell them what he thought and they always respected him for it,” Bean said. “He amazed me. I could have said the same thing and gotten shot.”

It was Ron’s ability to reflect on a situation that gave him conviction when he made a decision. That was certainly true when it came to giving his kidney to Richard, who was dying from chronic nephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys. There were serious ethical and health concerns expressed by vast segments of the medical community prior to the 1954 surgery.

Ron never wavered. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Well, this one will be interesting.

On Wednesday, ADP said 297,000 private-sector jobs were added in December.

On Thursday, the unemployment claims news was not good.

On Monday and Wednesday, the employment components in the Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing and Non Manufacturing Indices for December, while expanding, came in with lower expansion readings than November.

Oh, and Gallup says things got worse in December.

Everybody can’t be right.

This Associated Press news brief has a consensus guess that 145,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were added in December, and that the unemployment rate dropped from 9.8% to 9.7%.

We’ll see here at 8:30. Later this morning, I’ll look at how the real numbers (i.e. the ones not seasonally adjusted) came in.

HERE IT IS, with really good news on the surface about the rate but mediocre news on jobs added:

The number of unemployed persons decreased by 556,000 to 14.5 million in December, and the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4 percent. Over the year, these measures were down from 15.2 million and 9.9 percent, respectively. (See table A-1.)

… Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 103,000 in December. Employment rose in leisure and hospitality and in health care but changed little in other major industries. Since December 2009, total payroll employment has increased by 1.1 million, or an average of 94,000 per month. (See table B-1.)

… The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for October was revised from +172,000 to +210,000, and the change for November was revised from +39,000 to +71,000.

To be fair, December’s report shows 173,000 more people working than in November (December’s +103k plus 70k in changes to October and November). But whatever uptick ADP saw in December, BLS clearly didn’t.

The A table summary (all seasonally adjusted) shows that about 47% of the unemployment rate drop occurred because 260,000 people gave up looking for work and withdrew from the workforce, and that about 53% was due to more people working (+297,000). The workforce participation rate dropped by another 0.2% to 64.3%.

The B table summary shows 113,000 private-sectors jobs added (about 38% of what ADP had), with over 2/3 of the additions coming in education and health care.

More later.

______________________________________________

UPDATE: The not seasonally adjusted numbers are not impressive –

Both for all jobs and private-sectore jobs, December 2010 trailed every December from 2003-2007. This shouldn’t be happening during a supposed recovery after a deep recession. Instead, there should be more of a slingshot effect taking place. So unless ADP is really right and has picked up a trend before the government did, which we’ll not learn until next month, we’re still just muddling along unimpressively.

UPDATE 2: Heritage nails it –

Morning Bell: Americans Are Fleeing Obama’s Crony Capitalist Economy

You are going to hear a lot of noise from the White House about how this drop from a 9.8% unemployment rate to 9.4% means the economy is in a strong recovery. This is false. The reality is that the only reason the unemployment rate dropped is because the U.S. labor force decreased by 434,000. More importantly 260,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force entirely. This means that the Obama economy is now driving Americans out of the labor force faster than it is bringing them.

There is a phrase for an economy that is so dependent on close relationships between business people and government officials: crony capitalism. And it is strangling our economic recovery.

… There is a better way. Instead of relying on bailouts, subsidies, tax loopholes, and regulations to pick and choose which politically connected firms succeed or fail, government should unleash entrepreneurs to create jobs through true free enterprise policies. Specifically, Congress should:

• Rescind unspent stimulus funds;
• Reform regulations—specifically repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act—to reduce unnecessary business costs;
• Remove barriers to domestic energy production;
• Suspend the job-killing Davis–Bacon Act and prohibit Project Labor Agreement requirements on federally funded construction projects;
• Conclude the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, as well as the recently announced agreement with South Korea; and
• Reduce taxes on foreign earnings to encourage companies to repatriate the profits to America.

According to James Sherk, Karen Campbell, and John Ligon of the Center for Data Analysis, adopting these measures increase real gross domestic product by an average of $56 billion a year between 2011 and 2020, reduce the national debt by $305 billion by 2020, and increase job growth by 305,000 a year between 2011 and 2020.

If the President were truly interested in the type of robust economic growth that would bring about the kinds of increases in employment we need, he would be doing these things. He’s not. It would therefore appears that his professed interest is feigned. What tangible, policy-based evidence is there for an opposite conclusion?

From Ft. Leonard Wood, MO:

Posted: Saturday, January 1, 2011; 11:53 pm

Maj. Gen. David Quantock called it a “godsend” that despite 159 houses being damaged or destroyed, nobody was hurt and only four people suffered minor injuries.

During a Saturday afternoon press conference, Quantock credited the fact that many people were away from post on the Christmas block leave commonly known as Exodus. However, he also credited training and preparation given to soldiers and their families, many of whom may be from parts of the United States where tornados aren’t common.

“Some of this tornado training was also a big deal,” Quantock said. “Of the families we’ve been able to talk to, one in particular ran into a hallway; one ran into a closet. The only thing standing in that house was the closet and that’s where his little child, his wife and he were during the entire storm and were able to weather it out.”

Other factors, Quantock said, included the “giant voice” loudspeaker system which was blaring warnings of the impending tornado. Sirens also sounded about 15 minutes before the storm struck.

“I think that allowed some folks to seek cover and saved some lives,” Quantock said.

Quantock said the post regularly issues public service announcements informing its residents what to do.

“There are all kinds of plans of what to do, what will take place if that happens,” Quantock said. “I think that training comes in handy when you live in this part of the United States.”

An example of training that may have saved lives was that of Fort Leonard Wood’s staff judge advocate, the post’s top lawyer, whose home was destroyed along with almost everything inside.

“He saw the funnel cloud heading toward his house and got into an inner hallway with his two girls, his wife, and the two family cats, and was able to survive,” Quantock said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Well, that didn’t take long.

AP reporters Calvin Woodward and Andrew Taylor answered the bell and came out swinging at the Republican House within hours after John Boehner was sworn in as Speaker, accusing the GOP of supposedly breaking a number of core promises.

As usual when the wire service covers Republicans, there’s no shortage of inconsistency bordering on hypocrisy coming from AP’s alleged journalists.

Here are selected paragraphs from this morning’s report (“PROMISES, PROMISES: GOP drops some out of the gate”):

Republicans have already violated some of the vows they made in taking stewardship of the House.

Their pledge to cut $100 billion from the budget in one year won’t be kept. [1]

And for a coming vote seeking to repeal the health care overhaul, the first major initiative of the new Congress, lawmakers won’t be allowed to propose changes to the legislation despite Republican promises to end such heavy-handed tactics from the days of Democratic control. [2]

Is business as usual really back so fast? That’s not clear one day after Democrat Nancy Pelosi yielded the gavel to the new Republican House leader, John Boehner.

… “We will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels, saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone,” the GOP pledge stated.

It turns out $100 billion is way out of reach.

By the time the current stopgap spending bill expires March 4, five months of the budget year — which began Oct. 1 — will have passed. [1]

… What is more, Republicans juiced up the $100 billion promise in the first place by using as their starting point President Barack Obama’s $1.128 trillion budget request, a theoretical figure that was never approved by Congress. [3]

Notes:

• [1] — AP is naively and I believe erroneously assuming that the Pledge to America envisioned cutting $100 billion from the fiscal 2011 budget. That’s ridiculous. While it’s nice if they can pull it off, the intent, as was the case with the President’s ill-fated Budget Commissions, was to enact changes effective with the 2012 fiscal year, the first budget over which the GOP Congress anticipated having responsibility. How were they to know that even the December lame-duck Congress would kick the fiscal 2011 can down the road? By the way, the AP reporters also “somehow” forgot that the GOP promised to leave military spending out of its “back to 2008″ plans.
• [2] — The whining AP reporters acknowledge in a later paragraph that the GOP Pledge envisions an up-or-down, all-or-none vote on repealing ObamaCare. Allowing Democrats to cherry-pick provisions in separate votes would be a breach of that promise.
• [3] — This one is really hard to take. For as long as I can remember, the press has been framing spending “cuts” using the same benchmark the Republicans are using now, i.e., the President’s budget request and/or “projected” spending levels estimated by previous Congresses. It’s why alleged “cuts” have almost never resulted in real reductions of year-over-year spending. And since Pelosi’s Democratic Congress never even passed a real budget, what in the heck else is there available to use as an alternative benchmark?

Towards the end, the two AP reporters roll out the tired claim that repealing Obamacare will add to the deficit — as if anyone but the tooth fairy believes the pre-cooked pablum that the Congressional Budget Office was forced to produce based on constraints imposed by the Democrats in Congress on assumption the CBO could use.

While I’m in the neighborhood, can anyone remember when an Associated Press reporter took Nancy Pelosi to task during any of the dozens of times her crew violated their so-called Paygo rules during her four years in power? Neither do I.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Gas is above $3 a gallon, and it’s only winter. The higher-demand summer months have prompted predictions of $4 a gallon by then, and a former Shell exec predicts $5 next year.

A Wednesday evening Investors Business Daily editorial makes it clear this is happening largely because of Obama administration policies:

Energy Policy: Oil prices are surging to levels that will soon crimp economic growth. And what’s our government doing about it? Just making it worse.

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, the price of oil has rocketed 117% to $90.41 a barrel and gasoline has jumped 67% to $3.07 a gallon. In the 34 industrialized nations, oil imports have surged 34% in the last year to $790 billion. The U.S. alone has seen a $72 billion jump.

All this imperils a fragile recovery from the financial crisis. “Oil prices are entering a dangerous zone for the global economy,” says Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency.

Given the clear threat, it’s economically irrational to sit on our hands and fail to develop our own energy resources. At least 130 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas lie offshore, and hundreds of billions of barrels more are locked in shale deposits in the Northeast and West. Yet our policy remains leaving this wealth alone.

More than mere incompetence is at work here. It’s becoming more and more obvious that Obama’s energy policy is meant to raise prices by making fossil fuels harder to produce and use.

The primary “justification” for this remains the administration’s bitter clinging to the notions that the earth is dangerous warming (it’s not), and that it’s the fault of humans (again, not). The best refutation of those notions is here at American Thinker. The item was written in September 2009 by John McLaughlin, who wrapped with this statement:

What is becoming clearer is that the concept of “manmade global warming” may be one of the greatest hoaxes in world history. How soon this will become generally known will depend on how forcefully the political effort seeking both national and international control of industry and wealth redistribution can keep the hoax hidden by intimidation and forcefully amplified rhetoric while systematically jeopardizing the economies of America and other developed nations.

A couple of months later, the Climategate e-mails appeared. What was revealed therein changes the “may be” in the excerpted paragraph’s first sentence to “is.”

It is the Obama administration that is “systematically jeopardizing the economies of America” for no reason, as the IBD editorial makes clear:

In just two years, as Steve Everley of the American Solutions blog has noted, the Obama administration has:

• Virtually shut down oil drilling in the Gulf. Yes, the six-month moratorium announced during the BP oil spill ended in November. But regulators have made it nearly impossible for oil firms to restart operations and have slapped strict new rules on drilling even in shallow waters.

• Put hundreds of billions of barrels of offshore oil and gas off-limits to exploration and production. By executive order, the administration has taken much of the energy-rich Outer Continental Shelf out of play. This, according to the Energy Information Administration, will cut this year’s output by 220,000 barrels a day.

• Canceled 77 existing drilling leases in Utah, one of Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s first actions and a move that set the tone for the Obama administration’s war on energy.

• Proposed new taxes on energy, including the cap-and-trade fiasco, that have had a chilling effect on new investment in energy. Steven Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, has already let the cat out of the bag by saying he wants to see pump prices in the U.S. as high as they are in Europe. Last we checked, that was $7 a gallon.

America has the oil and natural gas resources to ensure its energy future as we develop reasonable, economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels. And that oil and gas is available right now.

Yet, our government has systematically put those resources out of reach, making us more dependent on unreliable foreign sources. Today we’re more, not less, vulnerable to the predations of foreign dictators and tyrants who would do us ill.

… Obama’s war against fossil fuels is a direct assault on our oil-dependent economy and standard of living.

It also makes a mockery of the idea that Obama and his far-left inner circle really want the economy to prosper.

What they don’t want is what anyone not immersed in leftist ideology wants: a rip-roaring, booming economy like we had in the 1980s under Reaganomics, or like we had for a time in the late-1990s, after now-Ohio governor John Kasich and the Republican Congress cut the capital gains tax and balanced the budget (before the Clinton administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission and the Democrat-dominated Big Brokerage community ruined it by allowing enthusiasm for nascent Internet enterprises to create an investment bubble).

For reasons purely related to Obama’s attempt to get reelected, it would appear that the administration wants enough of a “recovery” to make people think that they really do want things to get better. Whatever progress arrives in the coming months, never forget that it could have been at least twice as good — and it would have occurred years earlier — if they had only gotten out of the way.

From Chicago (video is at link):

December 29, 2010

A man who was brought back to life after 25 minutes without a pulse says it was a medical miracle.

John Chikos defied the odds after he had a massive heart attack. Now, he’s sharing the story of his second chance after death.

On December 10, Chikos and his wife Diane drove into Chicago from the suburbs.

“He just all of a sudden pulled the car over to the curb. I think that was Belmont and Wolcott. He leaned over by a wrought iron fence and just collapsed, Diane Chikos told ABC7.

Diane Chikos couldn’t get her cell phone to work, but a passerby called 911.

“The paramedics were there in moments, I didn’t even have time to say, hurry, hurry,” she said.

The paramedics couldn’t get his heart re-started. They transported him to Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital where cardiologist Peter Stecy found the main artery to Chikos’s heart blocked. He suffered a massive heart attack so dangerous it’s often called the ‘widow-maker.’

“Unless there is very, very rapid help at hand, they won’t survive,” said Dr. Stecy.

The team put a stent in to clear the blockage, but Chikos didn’t have a pulse for 25 minutes which can cause irreparable damage. Three days later Dr. Stecy saw something he’d never seen in his career.

“Mr. Chikos was sitting up in bed on his laptop trying to trade commodity futures, which he does for a living, when for the past four days the man was comatose,” said Dr. Stecy.

“All of a sudden, [they] put you in some procedure and three days later talking to your friends like nothing happened, it was a miracle,” Chikos said.

The Chikos family has always been spiritual, but during the agonizing wait they prayed and asked others to pray.

“I think it made believers out of a lot of us that would never would have considered the power of collective praying,” said Diane Chikos.

“Miracles can happen through people on earth, and that there are always people along the way that are angels that help us, that helped us call 911, like the paramedics who never gave up,” said Allison Chikos. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The Institute for Supply Management’s two primary reports came in strong this week:

• Monday’s Manufacturing Index was 57.0%, up from 56.6% in December, the 17th month in a row with an expansionary number above 50%.
• Today’s Non Manufacturing Index leaped to 57.1% from 55.0% in December.

The weighted average of the two indices is the highest it has been in a very long time.

ADP’s employment report shows 297,000 private-sector jobs added in December. That’s probably the highest number in about 3-1/2 years, if not longer, and was about triple expectations.

Oddly, the Employment components of the two ISM indices are heading in the opposite direction from ADP’s clearly cheerful and hopefully correct finding. While Manufacturing’s Employment reading of 55.7% remained strong, it was lower than November’s 57.5%. The Employment component in the far more important Non Manufacturing Index (80%-plus of the economy) dropped to a barely expanding 50.5% from 52.7%. That’s clearly not in sync with ADP.

If the ADP number comes close to holding up in Friday’s Employment Situation Report, all I can say is: What a difference the prospect of a Republican House placing some limits on the Obama administration makes. Don’t let us down, guys and gals.

Proven graphically at Political Calculations.

The question I asked a year ago still applies: “Rebound? What Rebound?“